Yep, all modern particle physics is like modern astronomy. We don’t actually “see” stuff anymore. We find statistically significant anomalies in huge data sets then triangulate from other lines of evidence to hypothesize what that anomaly probably is. It’s all very much less glamorous than people imagine big scientific discoveries are. They knew what the Higgs should look like in the data because the math predicted it, but it still took a while to find the numbers and confirm it wasn’t noise.
The deeper into the universe we get, the worse the signal-to-noise ratio gets in our observations, so all science of the very big and very small is about teasing tiny signals out of huge dumps of noise. This has to be done very rigorously to make sure the effect being seen is real.
I think you’re right. It’s not like they can turn the machine on and there’s a photo of three new quarks or whatever.
